Talk:Universal suffrage

This article has not yet been rated on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
It is of interest to the following WikiProjects:

Please add the quality rating to the {{WikiProject banner shell}} template instead of this project banner. See WP:PIQA for details.

Elections and Referendums

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Elections and Referendums, an ongoing effort to improve the quality of, expand upon and create new articles relating to elections, electoral reform and other aspects of democratic decision-making. For more information, visit our project page.Elections and ReferendumsWikipedia:WikiProject Elections and ReferendumsTemplate:WikiProject Elections and ReferendumsElections and Referendums

Please add the quality rating to the {{WikiProject banner shell}} template instead of this project banner. See WP:PIQA for details.

Politics High‑importance

	Politics portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Politics, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of politics on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.PoliticsWikipedia:WikiProject PoliticsTemplate:WikiProject Politicspolitics
High	This article has been rated as High-importance on the project's importance scale.

Please add the quality rating to the {{WikiProject banner shell}} template instead of this project banner. See WP:PIQA for details.

Human rights High‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Human rights, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Human rights on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Human rightsWikipedia:WikiProject Human rightsTemplate:WikiProject Human rightsHuman rights
High	This article has been rated as High-importance on the project's importance scale.

Britain 1918 -universal suffrage or not?

Britain allowed women to vote in 1918, but only if they were over 30, whereas back then the age when men could vote was 21. Does this count as universal suffrage or not? - Rich

Common Suffrage/Universal Suffrage

My knowledge of English, and history in the Anglo-Saxon world, might be the problem, but I get confused by the current definition of Universal suffrage.

I would, according to my prior knowledge and understanding, say that Common suffrage is the extension of voting privileges to all adults, without distinction to race, sex, belief or social status.

At the moment it's the race-issue which is stressed, which doesn't fit with my understanding. Sex and social status were at least as critical, as far as I know. But I must admit that this is grounded on my assembled reading on history, mostly in German, to some degree also in Danish, Swedish and French. I can not now point out any written sources to my support.

Maybe Universal suffrage is something else than Common suffrage?

-- Ruhrjung 16:22 May 5, 2003 (UTC)

From memory, Ruhrjung, "common suffrage" and "adult suffrage" mean the same thing. (But I haven't looked it up lately.) Both are normally used as synonyms for "universal suffrage", which is not strictly correct. The term we should use is "adult suffrage", as most (all?) places deny persons of less than a certain age the vote. (As an aside, I was unable to understand the justice in this when I was a child, and remain equally unable to understand it to this day. But there you are: the world is not always as we should like it to be.) Tannin.

I made a minor rewrite. -- Ruhrjung 15:47 May 7, 2003 (UTC)

The third paragraph makes no sense. The first paragraph establishes that Universal Franchise is the same as General or Common Suffrage, but then: "... universal suffrage (...) followed about a generation after universal adult franchise". So it followed about a generation after itself? The following sentence seems to hint that what is meant is women's suffrage, but not at all clearly. --Lasse Hillerøe Petersen (talk) 13:42, 29 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Reserving seats for communal groups

This is something different.... Reserving seats for communal groups isn't particularly uncommon, and it's different from denying the right to vote.

Most societies today no longer maintain such provisions, but a few still do. For example, Fiji reserves a certain number of seats in its Parliament for each of its main ethnic groups; these provisions were adopted in order to discriminate against Indians in favour of ethnic Fijians. Pakistan reserves certain seats in parliament for voting by "frontier" tribes.

Candidacy

Does the term universal suffrage also include equal right to stand as a candidate in general elections? 130.232.129.242 15:14, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)